In recent years, the sales holiday phenomenon has reached the Israeli market in full force, impacting stores in Israel and Israelis buying abroad during promotions. The massive growth of digital consumerism has only fueled the shopping holidays for Israeli consumers. When it comes to sales events and skyrocketing digital shopping statistics, the last quarter of the year is undoubtedly the busiest and most profitable period. This year, ahead of the Q4 sales holidays, we have prepared a list of tips to improve sales on your website. The shopping holidays of Q4 actually include several days specifically dedicated to consumerism and very attractive deals. The pool of potential buyers is in a strong shopping, deal-hunting, and spending mindset, especially online. Therefore, your store must be prepared and ready to reap the rewards and generate high-quality sales.
The entire realm of shopping holidays naturally originates from the US, the global consumer powerhouse, with the most well-known sales days (which have been fully adopted in Israel) being Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which follows a few days later (both at the end of November). But there are plenty of other special sales days, such as Halloween sales celebrations in late October, Veterans Day in early November, Singles’ Day on 11.11, Thanksgiving deals, Green Monday before Christmas, and of course Christmas and end-of-year sales. In Israel, we have the ShoppingIL events in the fourth quarter, dedicated to promotions and advancing the digital commerce of Israeli brands and stores.
Here are 8 tips to improve sales on your website:
1. Tell your customers about the crazy deals you're going to have and build anticipation
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the rest of the sales days of the year’s final quarter are a consumer festival, so they should look like one on your eCommerce site! You need to tell your customers about all the crazy promotions you are going to have on your site, build anticipation, and even change design elements on your site and social channels to reflect the deals and your sales festival. Announce deals via smart email campaigns, share on your social networks, place special banners on your desktop and mobile site, connect with deal-sharing communities to feature your content and promotions, and perform a variety of other creative actions that will show your target audience how worthwhile it is to visit your store during the sales days.
Here is an example of a banner on Next’s website for Halloween:
2. Create a sense of urgency
During digital sales holidays, there are a lot of potential buyers, and everyone is looking to get the best deals. They search for promotions, move between eCommerce platforms, and compare prices and terms. Therefore, you need to create, in an efficient and precise way, a sense of urgency to buy from you right now. You need to inform your target audience that your deals are now online, but demand is high and the promotions will not stay LIVE for long. You can implement this with a countdown timer counting down toward the end of specific promotions. In WordPress, you can use the plugin Sales Countdown Timer for WooCommerce, which adds a countdown clock next to products:
3. Tell them they are not the only ones looking to buy right now
Websites that show visitors, through dedicated technological applications, that other people are currently looking at the same product and also display live data on website sales, achieve better sales. Alternatively, you can display limited stock data on popular items. Let visitors and your target audience know that they are certainly not the only ones looking at this specific product right now and that more and more people are buying from you during the current sales holiday. This works because it provides social proof of relevance and actual purchases, and because it creates a sense of urgency to grab the deal before it runs out. A recommended plugin for WordPress is NotificationX which connects to site sales and shows people buying:
4. Create specific landing pages for sales events
An excellent landing page, precise and providing a quality response to what visitors are looking for, will achieve more conversions. Therefore, for the competitive sales holidays of Q4, create specific landing pages for each sales event you run, and according to your store’s needs and characteristics – specific landing pages for certain brands or categories. This way, you are very precise regarding why a visitor arrived at your site, you immediately put them in the right mindset, and it becomes easier to convert them into paying customers. You can direct visitors immediately to landing pages specific to a brand or category in your store, or you can direct them to a purchase-promoting landing page using a pop-up tailored to the visitor’s user profile on the home page. Here is an example of a deals page we created in 2020.
5. Ensure efficient and user-friendly filtering options!
It is very important to ensure efficient and user-friendly filtering of the various products on your eCommerce site, which improves the digital store’s user experience and therefore sales to new and returning customers. The site must have filtering options to find the product the visitor is looking for – by category, size, type, style, and so on. The plugin YITH WooCommerce Product Filter offers a wide variety of product filtering options.
6. Run pop-ups that visitors cannot ignore
While pop-ups were once super annoying for visitors and considered a completely forbidden practice for sites that wanted to provide a high-quality user experience without “annoying” Google, today the situation is much more refined, precise, and advanced. Smart use of pop-ups is entirely relevant today, using great technological tools and thoughtful advance planning. A high-quality pop-up can definitely improve conversions and purchases, and even lead visitors to buy beyond the products they originally came for. However, pop-ups must be super effective, precise, and well-timed to work and avoid becoming an obstacle. I really like using Poptin for website pop-ups; if I’m using WordPress, I use the pop-up plugin that comes with Elementor.
7. Ensure website navigation is user-friendly
Beyond a mobile-friendly site that works quickly and is impressively designed yet user-friendly, it is critical to ensure that navigation on the site and between different categories and product types is easy, intuitive, and provides an excellent user interface and experience. 80% of visitors will abandon a site that is difficult to navigate and where products are hard to find with a simple search! This optimization should of course be done before the shopping holiday season, using analytics tools, heatmaps, implementing tools for fast and efficient internal search results, smart category and product organization, activating product filtering tools by attributes, and so on. I like using the menu plugin Max Mega Menu. Here is an excellent example from Terminal X, where the site is full of products yet easy to navigate:
8. Create a simple and convenient user experience on the checkout page
The checkout process must be simple, convenient, and fast, with minimal hassle and complexity for the user, otherwise many visitors will “simply” abandon their shopping cart, and you will lose a customer who was just moments away from purchasing and paying on your site. This is true all year round, but especially during the shopping holidays of November and the end of the year, users are more prone to impulsive and quick purchases, and a cumbersome checkout process disrupts exactly that and leads to lost sales. One of the plugins I like is Side Cart For WooCommerce.
Summary
These are key, important, and proven tips for improving sales on your site ahead of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the rest of the sales events of November and Q4 in general; there are, of course, additional steps you can take. Spread the word about your promotions efficiently and widely, ensure your site works great and fast, combat cart abandonment, and implement a range of other technical and digital actions. Good luck and happy selling!
About the Author
Or Fialkov is the CEO and owner of Fialkov Digital, a digital marketing and advertising agency. He runs paid campaigns on Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok, and builds websites and landing pages. He also implements AI in businesses, including AI agents, agentic marketing automation, AI reporting systems, GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and AI video for campaigns.
